Digital voice processing systems are known that are in communication with telephone systems and perform functions such as voice signal compression, storage and retrieval, automatic gain control, voice activated operation, telephone functions and the like. These functions are performed by such systems in hardware which is costly and inflexible. In addition, expansion of a prior art voice processing system was difficult because of the need of additional hardware, not only because of the expense associated therewith, but also because of the geography factor, i.e., a larger footprint was required.
With the ever increasing change in technology, particularly software, it would be advantageous to be able to provide a software based digitized voice processing system that can be quickly, conveniently and inexpensively expanded. In addition, it would be advantageous to provide a digital voice processing system that is capable of handling a large amount of data and to which one can add capacity as required.
One drawback in providing such a voice processing system was the unavailability of a processing chip that could multiplex data to and from a time division multiplexer bus and to and from a plurality of processors and which has a small size.